True professionals are on time, ALL the time.

I used to ask this question in my personal effectiveness seminar:

If someone can only meet you at precisely 5am tomorrow morning to sign an RM1,000,000 deal, will you be able to make it on time?

The entire room went “Of course! I’ll do whatever it takes!”

The I ask the next question, why?

The answer is “Because it’s important enough.”

Then I ask the next question:

So, based on your own logic… why then are you habitually late for everything else… your wife, your husband, your kids, your partners, your clients, your friends… NONE OF THEM ARE IMPORTANT ENOUGH?

By now, I’ll be hearing lots of protests and justifications and righteous indignation of why it is “not the same”.

Let’s do some simple mathematics:

If you live to 80 and you spend 1 hour per day waiting for someone that is not on time, that is…

Imagine what you can do with 3.33 years extra, how many extra holidays, how many extra sales, how much more business, how much more quality time with your loved ones, etc, etc?

If you have the habit of being late, you are contributing to wasting that 3.33 years of life of the people around you.

Of course, there ARE unavoidable circumstances… What I am referring to are those who habitually plan to be late, even though they claim they don’t. You know the type…

… they have an appointment that is 30 minutes away without traffic but dilly-dally in front of their PCs until 10 minutes before then rush over, smile ‘apologetically’ and blame it on traffic…

…or, they schedule overlapping appointments so that they don’t have to wait for others while others have to wait for them…

…or, here’s my favorite – they have cultivated a reputation of being late that becomes a running joke they are actually proud to take advantage of, ie, “You know me and my time management whaaat….” “that’s me mah… I’m always late otherwise it’s not me…”

Folks… great leaders are punctual for everything, full stop. If you have staff who’s always late for meetings and late to work… look at yourself and your management team first.

 

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